That isn’t what I’m suggesting, just suggesting if you’re constantly imitating, you’re not really improving whether you design or code.

My reasoning for a designer to have an understanding of how a website is coded is just so they can design with those restraints in mind. I’m not saying they need to know how to code a perfectly semantic site, every vendor prefix, ect.

I also think it goes both ways, if you primarily code, I think you should also learn a bit about the design aspect of it as well as not every little design element will be laid out for you on every page and sometimes you’ll have to make design decisions (at least in my experience).

I should clarify what I mean by imitating. Didn’t want to make it sound like copying. Two are very different IMO. Imitating is simply seeing something and iterating over it to make it better, expend on the concept or conform the idea to what you are trying to achieve.

I agree that it’s supremely beneficial, but IMO is not required to have successful team.

I was looking at this app a few weeks ago and am actually kind of excited about it. It seems to solve a lot of the problems I was having with reflow when playing with it such as reusable classes and using anything but absolute positing as a default.

Based on the presentation at the HTML5 conf in SF a few months back, adobe wants to push reflow as a replacement for Photoshop for responsive web designers. They do want to be part of the workflow for industry professionals, though that might have just been marketing speak. I personally don’t see myself changing my workflow out of Photoshop any time soon, though I just use it lay out ideas and do a majority of my “design” work in sass.

My company does use contractors for some design work, and I think an app like this would be good for them as none of them seem to really consider the impact some of what they are trying to do with have on the code of the site. Not that it would change their designs much, but little things like, do all of these images need fancy curved drop shadows that either have to be images or take waaaay to much css to replicate, or can they just be normal css box shadows?

Tips

What now? I have some ideas for you.

Go explore CodePen!

As a front end designer and developer, you should have an account on CodePen so you can save your snippets, present your ideas, and engage with the rest other front end folk. I'd encourage you to go PRO as well, to unlock the full power of CodePen.

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